Harry Reid: Sen. Perdue ‘was praying for the death’ of President Obama

John SextonPosted at 5:21 pm on June 10, 2016

It’s an election season so it must be time for more made up controversies invented by Senator Harry Reid. Today Reid spokesperson is accusing Sen. David Perdue of praying for the death of President Obama. Here is video of what Perdue actually said at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington Friday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihCWQ-52ZO8

This was obviously intended to be a joke. You can tell because a) people laughed and b) Perdue’s very next line was “In all seriousness….” Nevertheless, Harry Reid’s spokesperson put out a statement likening this to a prayer for the president’s death. Fox News reports:

“If Republicans are still wondering why Donald Trump is their nominee, look no further than today’s Faith and Freedom conference where a sitting Republican Senator left the impression he was praying for the death of President Obama and then the Republican Leader followed him on stage and did not condemn him,” she said in a statement.

Note that Reid doesn’t say who was left with this impression. Perdue was asked if he regretted his comments by Politico:

Asked if he regretted his remarks in an interview afterward, Perdue answered: “Of course not.”

“It was a little humor and I said it in a way that we were talking about his days as president,” Perdue said. “So I said ‘May his days be few,’ and that’s a direct quote from the Scripture. And I set it up by saying, in relation to his being in the office of the presidency.”

The basis of Reid’s claim this was intended as a prayer for Obama’s death comes from the next passage of the Psalm (which Perdue did not mention):

Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.

That’s pretty dark but, again, Perdue didn’t go there. He made a joke about the end of Obama’s term and that’s how the audience took it.

Harry Reid knows this wasn’t a prayer for anyone’s death, but it’s not like the truth has held him back before. During the last election season he announced that someone had told him Mitt Romney had paid no taxes. This wasn’t true but Sen. Reid kept repeating it anyway. CNN’s Dana Bash asked him if he regretted making the bogus claims last year. “So no regrets, not about Mitt Romney about the Koch brothers? Some people have even called it McCarthyite,” Dana Bash asked. Reid replied, “Well, they can call it whatever they want. Um…Romney didn’t win, did he?”

That’s what it was about then and that’s all it is about now. It’s why Reid’s spokesman opened her comments by dropping Donald Trump’s name.